Dr. Xiao-Chun Xu, the Chairman and CEO of Boyalife Group, said his company is already working on improving the cloning of primates to better test animals for diseases. He added that they already have the technology to clone humans, and it is just a “short biological step” from monkeys to humans. He emphasized that his company in not yet engaged in human cloning and practices “self-restraint” because of possible adverse reaction.

“We are going [down] a path that no one has ever travelled,” he told the Guardian following the unveiling of the factory’s blueprint this week. “We are building something that has not existed in the past.”Chinese scientists have cloned cattle, sheep, and pigs since 2000. A joint venture between Boyalife and its South Korean partner Sooam Biotech was the first commercial cloning company in China, which was established in September 2014 with the birth of three pure-blooded Tibetan mastiff puppies.

Sooam Biotech is currently working on a project to bring the woolly mammoth back from extinction by cloning cells preserved for thousands of years in the Siberian permafrost.

The South Korean firm is reportedly serving a niche market cloning the dead pet dogs of customers for $100,000 each clone.

Sooam Biotech head Woo-Suk was quoted by Dong-a Ilbo newspaper saying, "We have decided to locate the facilities in China in case we enter the phase of applying the technology to human bodies.”

The main focus of the 14,000-square-metre facility will be cloning cattle to feed China’s skyrocketing demand for beef.

BoyaLife initially hopes to produce 100,000 “top quality” cow embryos a year and to eventually be responsible for 5% of the premium cattle slaughtered in China.

The intended size of the operation dwarfs that of US companies allowed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to sell meat and dairy from cloned livestock since 2008. After a lengthy debate over cloned livestock, the FDA ruled that clones were as safe to eat as any other cattle, pigs or goats. But most cloned cattle in the US are used as breeding stock, to raise the quality of herds, rather than to sell for food.

In the UK, meat and milk from cloned cows are considered “novel foods” and suppliers need special permission to sell them.

In 2010, beef from the offspring of a cow cloned in the US entered the food chain,leading to an investigation by the Food Standards Agency.

In its latest statement on cloned animals, the European Food Safety Authority said there was no evidence of differences between meat and dairy products from clones or their offspring and healthy, conventionally bred animals, but reiterated its concerns that the cloning process can cause animal health and welfare problems. “Animal health and welfare remain a matter of concern, mainly due the increased number of deaths at all stages of development,” the organisation said.

Scientists at BoyaLife will also focus on cloning champion racehorses and sniffer dogs capable of locating victims of natural disasters or stashes of illegal drugs.

Xu said the clone factory would also serve humanity and nature by helping rescue endangered species from the brink of extinction.

"This is going to change our world and our lives,” he said.“It is going to make our life better. So we are very, very excited about it.”

LET'S GO BACK TO THAT ONE SENTENCE FOR A MINUTE...

"We have decided to locate the facilities in China in case we enter the phase of applying the technology to human bodies.”

I FIND NO CLARIFICATION OF THAT STATEMENT, WHETHER HE MEANT CLONING FROM LIVE OR DEAD BODIES.

AND OBVIOUSLY, HE BELIEVES CHINA WILL ALLOW HUMAN CLONING .

THERE IS MUCH ABOUT THIS THAT SEEMS OMINOUS.

THEY WOULD BE ABLE TO CLONE FROM DEAD BODIES.THEY WOULD BE ABLE TO CLONE WITHOUT PERMISSION OR EVEN KNOWLEDGE OF THE 'DONOR', USING DEAD BODIES...OR LIVE ONES, ACTUALLY. OBTAINING HUMAN DNA IS FAIRLY EASY TO DO, AND CAN BE DONE QUITE SUBTLY.

With this newest cloning method, all that is needed is a skin cell, or any viable cell containing human DNA.

THE FIRST PRIMATE WAS CLONED IN 2007...EIGHT YEARS AGO."The paper is not only the best but also by far the most useful work to date showing that it is possible to carry out the cloning procedure and to obtain ES cell lines in primates. The overall success rate of 0.7 per cent is still too low to be used in human studies, especially given the difficulty in obtaining eggs for research.

Unless there is some other way to improve the methods then it may well still be necessary to use eggs from other species in combination with human somatic cells, to obtain cytoplasmic hybrid embryos, which can then be used to derive the essentially human ES cell lines. "

THE TEA ROOM WOULD LIKE A VERY LONG, VERY CLOSE, VERY IN-DEPTH LOOK AT THOSE "CYTOPLASMIC HYBRID EMBRYOS".

PLEASE BE AWARE THAT THERE ARE CURRENTLY NO SOLID REGULATIONS SET FOR THE DISPOSAL (TERMINATION) OF CLONED HUMAN EMBRYOS.

Doing so could require the production of cloned embryos from people with a range of diseases. Experiments that depend on custom-made embryos could also be used to investigate complex human diseases, infertility and, perhaps eventually, to generate genetically matched replacement tissues for people who lose organs to disease or degeneration.

For some, this raises two dangerous spectres: cloned human babies, and a future in which human embryos are callously created and destroyed for various kinds of research.

Both scenarios can be avoided. Current policies (and probable biological barriers) are sufficient to mitigate the first. The second can be headed off by adding a provision to existing oversight structures.

Human reproductive cloning is already preemptively illegal in more than 30 countries and in 13 US states.

Even in US states where reproductive cloning is not banned, it would require regulatory oversight by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The frequently observed ill health of cloned mice, sheep and other animals make safety concerns alone sufficient for the FDA and similar agencies in other countries to block attempts to clone a human baby.

This is the position of scientific guidelines issued by the International Society for Stem Cell Research, the US National Academy of Sciences and the 1997 National Bioethics Advisory Commission.

The ethics of creating and destroying human embryos for research are complex.

Laboratory-produced human embryos have, at minimum, a symbolic value for most people and should not be used carelessly. Whether the latest advances could lead to research that trivializes embryos is uncertain. Nevertheless, wise policy would allay social fears while maintaining public support for scientific research.

Barriers to obtaining eggs will limit the production of embryos for less-than-cutting-edge research.

But it is important to review specifically whether the questions that a custom-made embryo could help to answer justify its creation."

The first stem-cell lines from cloned human embryos were reported in May last year by a team led by reproductive biology specialist Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon Health & Science University in Beaverton (see 'Human stem cells created by cloning').

Those cells carried genomes taken from fetal cells or from cells of an eight-month-old baby1, and it was unclear whether this would be possible using cells from older individuals. (Errors were found in Mitalipov's paper, but were not deemed to affect the validity of its results.)

BABIES BORN WITH THREE PARENTS FOREVER CHANGED THE GENETIC STRUCTURE OF THE HUMAN SPECIES...THE HUMAN 'GERMLINE'.

Fearing the potential effects of creating genetically modified babies, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) introduced a prohibition in 2001 on a relatively new in vitro fertilization procedure known as cytoplasmic transfer, which had already resulted in the birth of an estimated 30 children worldwide.

What precisely were the FDA’s concerns?

The healthy babies born of this technique all had genetic material from three separate individuals, two women and one man.

Today, a private fertility clinic in New Jersey is quietly investigating the 17 designer babies it helped create using the procedure before the FDA ban went into effect, The Independent reports, in order to learn more about the long-term health effects.

Cytoplasmic transfer involves transferring part of one woman's egg into another's.

Embryologists use the healthy portion of a donor egg (the cytoplasm) to supplement the defective portion of an infertile mother’s egg.

Essentially, they take two eggs and make one good egg.

Once the good egg is fertilized, the resulting embryo is supposed to contain nuclear DNA (99 percent of a cell’s genetic material) from the mother and father, and mitochondrial DNA (less than one percent of a cell’s genetic material) from the egg donor.

However, a small amount of unforeseen genetic overlap occurs.

The children who have been produced by this method actually have extra bits of mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, from both women.

Having inherited extra genes, these children have incorporated them into their germline — the genetic material they will eventually pass onto their own children. In effect, then, the embryologists who used this technique to create these children have altered the human germline and meddled with the structure of our species."

SINCE THESE 30 OR MORE KNOWN INDIVIDUALS HAVE ALL, BY NOW, 15 YEARS LATER FOR ANY BORN IN 2000 BEFORE THE BAN, ATTAINED PUBERTY, IT WOULD BE GOOD TO KNOW IF ANY HAVE REPRODUCED, AND IF SO, IF THERE WERE ANY PROBLEMS IN THEIR OFFSPRING.

I CAN THINK OF MANY QUESTIONS ABOUT THEIR OFFSPRING.

"Earlier this year, IRMS began its long-term study of the 17 children, according to The Independent, though so far it has not released any details.

Jacques Cohen, one of the four embryologists who pioneered cytoplasmic transfer, told the Independent the follow-up study is being led by Dr. Serena Chen, a fertility specialist at the IRMS.

“Because the research team members accepted different positions elsewhere, no follow-up was conducted until this year,” Cohen told The Independent in an email, adding, “The current follow-up study is ongoing and results will be made available in a medical journal.”

Seemingly, once the results are published or possibly even before then, the FDA will once again rule on whether to permit this controversial procedure.

Meanwhile, in Britain, the wheels are already spinning. Legislation to legalize a similar technique called mitochondrial donation is before Parliament, which is expected to rule on the issue shortly.

Like cytoplasmic transfer, the procedure will result in IVF babies with genetic material from three people. If legislation is passed, then, the first British genetically modified baby, who carries DNA from three people, could be born as early as next year."

Around the world, the laws governing what's allowed when it comes to "editing the human germ line," the technical name for what the Chinese scientists did, are a mixed bag.

That means that while the technology still has a long way to go before people can actually make genetically engineered babies, in many places there are no laws preventing a scary "Gattaca scenario," where designer babies become routine — just some loose guidelines and a variable sense of ethics.

In a study published in 2014, Motoko Araki and Tetsuya Ishii of Hokkaido University in Japan looked at the rules in 39 countries and found that 29 of them (lighter pink on the map below) had a ban on such research.

Of those, 25 (darker pink) had legally binding bans; the other four, including China, had guidelines banning the practice but not exactly enforceable laws.

In the remaining 10 countries (dark gray on the map), the rules were "ambiguous."

They set aside the US as a special case (light gray on map) : no outright ban, but rules that are very restrictive.

The fact that the first published research showing the editing of an embryonic genome — an attempt to alter the DNA that would be passed on to future generations — happened in a country with an ostensible ban on such research should raise some alarm.

The complex regulatory environment that's clear on the map above means there are plenty of loopholes — even in the countries that have tried to anticipate the coming wave of ethically questionable experimentation.

There is an important distinction between legal bans and guidelines.

Along with China, India, Ireland, and Japan also have guidelines that are not legally binding; those countries, as well as the US, "might permit it," the researchers predict, once such techniques become safer.

Genome editing, or genome editing with engineered nucleases (GEEN) is a type of genetic engineering in which DNA is inserted, replaced, or removed from a genome using artificially engineered nucleases, or "molecular scissors."

Clones are organisms that are exact genetic copies. Every single bit of their DNA is identical.There USED TO BE only two ways to make an exact genetic copy of an organism in a lab: artificial embryo twinning and somatic cell nuclear transfer.

NOW WE CAN ADD 'Induced pluripotent stem cells' (also known as iPS cells or iPSCs) which can be generated directly from adult cells. The iPSC technology was pioneered by Shinya Yamanaka’s lab in Kyoto, Japan in 2006.

The General Assembly this morning adopted the United Nations Declaration on Human Cloning, by which Member States were called on to adopt all measures necessary to prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life.

Acting on the recommendation of the Sixth Committee (Legal), contained in its report A/59/516/Add.1, the Assembly adopted the text by a vote of 84 in favour to 34 against, with 37 abstentions.Regretting the failure to achieve consensus, several delegations said they had voted against the text today because the reference to “human life” could be interpreted as a call for a total ban on all forms of human cloning.

The Assembly had missed an opportunity to adopt a convention prohibiting reproductive cloning, said the United Kingdom representative, because of the intransigence of those who were not prepared to recognize that other sovereign States might decide to permit strictly controlled applications of therapeutic cloning.

Echoing the views of a number of speakers, he said the Declaration was a non-binding political statement, which would not affect his country’s position on the issue.

The representative of China, also speaking in explanation after the vote, said that different countries varied in their understanding of the text’s inherent moral, ethical and religious aspects, and it was regrettable that the Declaration failed to give effect to the concerns of those countries.

The prohibitions contained in the text could be misunderstood as covering all forms of cloning.

Having voted against the Declaration, the Chinese Government would continue to adhere to its position against reproductive human cloning, while maintaining strict controls over therapeutic cloning.

THEN MAY WE HAVE A CONCISE DEFINITION, UNIVERSALLY ACCEPTED AND ENFORCED, OF WHAT, PRECISELY, "THERAPEUTIC CLONING" IS?

In our view, genome editing in human embryos using current technologies could have unpredictable effects on future generations. This makes it dangerous and ethically unacceptable.

Such research could be exploited for non-therapeutic modifications. We are concerned that a public outcry about such an ethical breach could hinder a promising area of therapeutic development, namely making genetic changes that cannot be inherited.

At this early stage, scientists should agree not to modify the DNA of human reproductive cells.

Should a truly compelling case ever arise for the therapeutic benefit of germ­line modification, we encourage an open discussion around the appropriate course of action.

REMEMBER THAT "SINGING MOUSE"I WROTE BRIEFLY ABOUT BEFORE, THAT RESULT OF JAPANESE GENETIC MODIFICATION, IN WHICH THEY TOSSED TOGETHER A LOT OF BITS AND PIECES IN A "GENE SALAD" AND GOT ODD CREATURES?

SUCH AS THAT COME TO MIND AS I SEE THE ADVANCES AND THE LACK OF REGULATION IN THIS BUSINESS OF CLONING AND GENE EDITING.THE MOVIE "TOY STORY 1" ALSO COMES TO MIND...THE SAD, SCARY TOYS THAT SID BUILT...

AND THE NAGGING QUESTION....WHAT IF...WHAT IF THERE IS A "SID" IN SOME LAB SOMEWHERE, WHO, MAYBE JUST ON A WHIM...?

I KNOW, I KNOW...I CAN SELF-DIAGNOSE, THANKS.

MY ANALYST HAS BEEN ON MY SPEED-DIAL SINCE I BECAME A GRANDPARENT.

GRANDCHILDREN SEEM SO MUCH MORE FRAGILE AND PERPLEXING THAN THEIR PARENTS WERE.